Behind the Voice-Over, A Familiar Screen Face

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: May 2, 2007

In a studio in Manhattan last Friday, Liev Schreiber was recording the narration of ''Brooklyn Dodgers,'' a two-part documentary that HBO will show on July 11. He was a few hours from heading uptown to the Longacre Theater, where he is starring in the Broadway revival of ''Talk Radio'' as Barry Champlain, an abrasive talk show host who loathes his listeners and is losing control of himself just as his program is being syndicated.

The lacerating tone he uses to animate Champlain is a characterization apart from his cool, elegant narrating, which has gone from a sidelight to a thriving second career.

In an ill-ventilated soundproof booth made stuffier by his cigarette, Mr. Schreiber read his ''Dodgers'' script from a music stand. ''Ebbets Field is gone forever,'' he said, recalling the team's beloved little ballpark without sounding overly elegiac. ''The men who played there are now ghosts in a place where once they were gods. But a half-century later after they vanished, the spirit of the ghosts of Flatbush endures in Brooklyn and far beyond. So, too, does one question: Why them?''

Two days later he would be in another Manhattan studio, narrating the third of four parts of ''De La Hoya-Mayweather 24/7,'' a behind-the-scenes documentary series that has followed the boxers Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. in advance of their heavily marketed World Boxing Council junior middleweight title fight on Saturday in Las Vegas.

Tomorrow he will return to narrate the series finale, which HBO will televise that evening.

Mr. Schreiber is an extremely busy documentary narrator, but observers of his stage, film and television work might not easily recognize his voice in dozens of HBO, PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries since the mid-1990s. His voice does not leave the imprint of, say, James Earl Jones's, and he is not a huge celebrity whose actions and utterances are chronicled daily on TMZ.com.

On Broadway, before ''Talk Radio,'' he won a Tony Award for his role as a salesman in ''Glengarry Glen Ross'' in 2005, the year before he was the programmed assassin in Jonathan Demme's remake of ''The Manchurian Candidate.'' Earlier this year he was a brooding investigator in a four-episode turn on ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'' on CBS. And later this year he will appear in the film version of ''Love in the Time of Cholera.''

Mr. Schreiber ventured another reason for the relative anonymity of his documentary voice. ''I try to lose most of my sort of natural ethnicity on the docs, my New York sound, that great mid-Atlantic sound,'' he said during a break in his work on the Dodgers film. ''I think I have a good voice. You want it to be familiar, but you don't know why. It's a subliminal thing.''

Ross Greenburg, the president of HBO Sports, said he was watching the PBS series ''Rock & Roll'' in 1995 when he was impressed by the soothing authority of Mr. Schreiber's voice.

''It's a calm voice that cuts through,'' said Mr. Greenburg, who has hired Mr. Schreiber for more than 30 documentaries. ''He reads a line with passion, but with a distant passion, like your grandfather telling you stories.''

Mr. Schreiber is a favorite voice among the producers at PBS series like ''Nova,'' ''Nature,'' ''Secrets of the Dead'' and ''American Experience,'' where his voice was recently heard on a documentary about the United States government's development of biological weapons.

''It's like graduate school,'' he said, ''and you get paid.''

Paula Aspell, the senior executive producer of ''Nova,'' said that she generally preferred higher-energy narrators than the high-priced Mr. Schreiber, but she prizes his ''sardonic detachment.''

''Most actors can act the script,'' she said, ''but they can lose journalistic detachment.''

Behind the glass booth of the recording studio, cigarette smoke nearly enveloped Mr. Schreiber as he read from the ''Brooklyn Dodgers'' script. He sipped from a cup of coffee. ''Nicotine and coffee make everything better,'' he said afterward. He answered his ringing cellphone, telling his caller: ''I'm doing a documentary on the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yeah, it's pretty cool.''

He frequently reread portions of the script, testing out different ways to say the same words, and repeated other sections when the producers Amani Martin and Ezra Edelman asked him for a new emphasis on certain words or phrases. He tested the rhythms of sentences to grasp their meaning (he did not know which sound bites preceded or followed his narration) and to seek some improvement. (He usually lost.)

He insisted that he knew the basics of the Dodgers' story, but mispronounced various names. When he approached the name of the third baseman Cookie Lavagetto, Mr. Schreiber said, ''Lav-a-hey-hey-hey!'' and laughed.

As he left the studio, his mind was rapidly shedding everything he had just uttered about Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey and Walter O'Malley. ''I don't remember anything I've done, the facts or anything,'' he said. ''Someone will come up to me to talk about the C.I.A.'' -- the subject of a documentary on the Discovery Channel -- ''and I know I know something, but I can't remember what it is. It's too bad. I've read a lot of good things.''

He suggested that it does not require much knowledge of a subject to sound like a smart narrator. ''You just have to make sense of what the person wrote and not make a big show of it,'' he said. ''If you do that -- magically -- everybody thinks it's fantastic, but it's not. Don't worry about anything else. It will fall in place once you begin to make sense.''